This advertisement claims that New Yorkers prefer Old Golds to the other leading cigarette brands. It presents the information in the style of a newspaper article, and was likely printed in newspapers, making the information seem both timely and newsworthy. In this “concealed name” cigarette test, each of the four leading brands has a “mask” wrapped over its brand name on the cigarette paper, so the smoker cannot see which brand is which. The public accountants hired by Old Gold print the results gathered from among 4,754 people “who entered one of the ‘testing shops.’ Clearly, there was a large factor of self-selection in this survey which makes the results unreliable. The testing draws on five locations in New York which are meant to cover people of all social strata: the financial district (517 brokers, bankers, merchants, and secretaries), Fifth Avenue (241 “fashionable shoppers and mid-town business men”), as opposed to the Bronx (172 “Bronxites”), and the Bowery (767 of those “of the blue shirt and calloused hands”).
Cough, Health, Throat
